Connecting Big Data and SDN: The biggest opportunities and challenges.

What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for R&E networking emerging from the intersection of Big Data and software defined networking (SDN)? This lightning talk will quickly summarize the most provocative top-level themes identified at a workshop in April 2013 that gathered a compact set of thought leaders from across and beyond the R&E networking community, as well as from discipline communities and industry. Today, a wide range of disciplines, including those not traditionally associated with computational methods and large data sets, are increasingly looking to “Big Data” to support cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research. To meet this challenge, R&E networks are incorporating into their plans and strategies emerging developments such as software defined networking (SDN) and cloud services, with aspects that originated in, and now are being embraced by, the R&E networking community.